[ZODB-Dev] ZODB 3.3 beta 1 released

[Tim Peters]

[John Belmonte]
> I just used the setup.py as always, and am reporting what's getting put
> into /usr/bin.

I understand.  The disconnect here is that the setup.py in the release
tarball is no longer the setup.py checked in to the ZODB project.  The
setup.py in the release tarball was generated by zpkg.  The setup.py checked
in to ZODB is still the only one I know anything about, though, so I'm
thrashing semi-blindly here too.

> I don't understand about this zpkg thing yet.  I haven't found any
> explanation about what's wrong with distutils,

I guess you haven't used it much <wink>.

> or what it adds to distutils.

zpkg is a layer on top of distutils.  The proposal for it came out of Zope 3
development (sorry, you'll probably have to paste this URL together):

<http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/Zope3Packa
gingProposal>

The problems discussed there are real, and Zope 3 (including ZODB 3.3) is
using zpkg to address them.

> With my Debian packager's hat on, if I have to use zpkg to build and
> install zodb, that is a big headache.  It means that zpkg has to be
> packaged and in Debian itself.

As I understand it so far, zpkg was used to create the ZODB release tarball,
but nothing in the generated setup.py within that tarball requires zpkg --
the generated setup.py is purely a distutils script.  A bunch of .cfg files
are in the tarball (they're input to zpkg), but I believe they're passive
(were used by zpkg to create the tarball, but at least so far have no active
role beyond that).  Fred will correct me if I'm wrong.

A particular low-level glitch driving the adoption of zpkg for ZODB 3.3b1
was that distutils is currently incapable of building a release from an SVN
checkout directory.  I patched current Python CVS distutils to solve one of
the problems with that, but turned I didn't catch all of them.  zpkg already
deals with SVN gracefully.